Thanks for all the accolades!!
I did a lot of grinding and filing to get it to look like that. As usual, I was way too involved in the job to get any pictures of the process. I'm sorry!
I taught myself to weld back in the day mainly by reading pipefitters' training documentation. It pretty neatly translates over to dropouts: thick steel, welded in multiple passes. There's a lot of concern with getting the right sort of v-groove, and then they do a whole routine of "weld, grind, repeat". That's what I did here, but it's a little less extreme because this stuff isn't so thick!
I just hope it holds together! A well-aligned dropout will go a long ways. When I was done welding, the dropouts were spaced funny (of course). Neal will have to spread the frame and re-align before all's said and done.